During yesterday’s Amazon Prime Day, our deals team (with the help of our social team and editorial staff) dove deep into all of Amazon’s deals, and things turned out differently than last year. Prime Day 2015 proved to be mostly hype, but this time around we were pleasantly surprised by the quantity of deals, the selection, and the available stock. Prime Day 2016 was a solid event that included plenty of opportunities to save some serious cash on desirable products. We scanned about 7,950 deals and found 64 that we thought were good enough to recommend and post on our Deals page, in contrast to 3,228 scanned and 35 posted last year.

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So was Amazon Prime Day worth it? For Prime members, the answer was most likely yes, and this year was far better than the previous one. Whereas the first Prime Day offered fewer deals in general and gave us more of the feeling that we had walked into a gigantic virtual dollar store, this year we found good deals in a wider variety of categories such as kitchen appliances and power tools. Some of the highlights included fantastic deals on some of our top Android phone picks, with multiple phones selling for $50 under their previous lows; a solid buy on our best carry-on luggage; a huge drop on our favorite smart light bulbs, the Philips Hue starter set; almost a full $100 drop on the Huawei smartwatch, our pick for people who like a bigger smartwatch; and nearly 50 percent off our upcoming pressure cooker pick.

We scanned each deal, and after comparing it against our research into the best historical prices for each product, we made recommendations as to what price we thought would make for a real bargain.

Although we found deals across a broad range of categories, we had difficulty finding good deals in popular mainstream tech categories such as headphones, monitors, and laptop computers. For shoppers willing to spend a bit more, however, we saw some opportunities to pick up big-ticket items (like full featured Denon A/V receivers and last year’s high-end Logitech remotes) that we wouldn’t ordinarily recommend (save as upgrade picks) on sale prices that competed with the prices of mainstream picks.

Unsurprisingly, Prime Day focused on Amazon’s own ecosystem. The company offered good deals on its own products, with significant discounts on Fire tablets, Kindles, associated subscriptions like the Kindle Unlimited book-lending service, and voice-controlled speakers in the Echo lineup. Echo owners had access to a number of deals available only through ordering via the Alexa virtual assistant.

Overall, we were pleased to find that many of this year’s deals hit new lows and stuck around for a while (many of the lightning deals lasted for up to an hour), with enough stock on hand that shoppers had an actual opportunity to pick up the products they wanted, rather than staring at a waitlist screen and coming away disappointed. Instead of hearing a lot of aggravation and frustration (aside from some early checkout issues, which were apparently isolated), we gathered from our readers that they were generally happy with how Amazon handled this year’s event. Here’s hoping the trend continues next year.

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